Italian film festivals
are one of the age's great gifts to mankind, welding the inspirational energy
of the Italian Ren­aissance to the plug-in modernism of 20th-century
technology. Festivals that attempt to join good movies to a spectac­ular
setting are ten a penny – who needs more of them? In Italian fests the
setting gets fused with the film program. It's a union you find nowhere else.
The dif­ferent parts get sticky in the sun and you can't separate them; the
place and the pictures snarl up together in an amazing knot.

In Taormina, nature
gets in on the act of movie symbolism. Semiologists
have been yakking on for years about the "su­ture" in cinema – that
wound-like hole, the movie screen, through which we spy another reality. Taormina gives
us Na­ture's own greatest suture, the magnifi­cent volcanic Mount Etna. Its
crater bubbles away on the Sicilian skyline like a red-hot bowl of tomato
soup. Menac­ingly it eyes the 20,000 spectators seated for the evening
screenings in Taormina's giant Greco-Roman
amphitheater.

Like any volcano, the
festival had pe­riods of dormancy in this, its fifteenth year. You'd sit
through days in which nothing happened beyond a comatose Hungarian allegory,
a prostrate Finnish adaptation of Crime and Punishment,and a Russian snorer about
Our Brave Boys at the Front. Then suddenly flames leap up, lava hits you in
the eye, and you get a film like Tony Gatliff'sLes Princes
(The Princes). This French debut
movie wowed everyone and won the top prize of the Golden Cyclops (more ripe
sym­bolism – the monocular Cyclops sport­ing two-dimensional vision just like
us filmgoers).

Les Princes is a
film for gypsies, about gypsies, by a gypsy. It's an amazing thunderclap of
comedy and melo­drama. Pursued by a tracking, darting,
zipping-around-the-place camera, its hawk-faced Saturnine hero stomps along
life's roads, towing his little daughter and led by his palm-reading
80-year-old mom who checks her Tarot cards for directions as she trudges
along on a mysterious quest.

The fun lies in Gatliff's relish of a world in which nomadic penury leads
to a life-style of lawless surrealism: the kitten Mom keeps in the fridge,
the umbrella she uses to hook a tableful of couscous,the window of a momentar­ily
deserted dining room, the Poe-like madman who, his love's labors lost, keeps
crying "Ma-de-leine!" in a mid­night
waste ground. The movie moves along like the clappers; it is at once
operatic, delightful, and thunderously dramatic. And it isn't until the last
scene that you realize that Gatliff has, quite
casually, pulled you back in time to the continuous dawn of Romany and into
the slipstream of the gypsy quest.

The crowd roared its
approval in the amphitheater. And so they did at peak moments during the
Hollywood mov­ies unveiled in Taormina's non-com­petitive
"Second American Film Week": including Beat Street, Splash, Romancing the Stone,et al. This event, born last year, is an ace slot in the European
festival program that U.S. distributors should be falling over themselves to
fill. Where else will you find an audience of 20,000 entertain­ment-hungry
fans ready to deafen an entire Italian town with their approval? Guglielmo Biraghi, the courteous and
admirable fest director, is laying on
the event again next year. Sunset Boule­vard, please note.

Elsewhere in Taormina, the
festival never rests from the task of slotting this new-fangled business of filmgoing into a timeless mythic matrix. There is, for
instance, the Sisyphus Event each evening; a bus-load of journalists is
transported from seaside hotels to hill­top Taormina
to
see the films. These unfold alternately in the amphitheater, crowded with the
ghosts of Sophocles and Euripides, or in the Cinema Olim­pia, which
has a slide-open roof (an­other suture) through which, if you're bored with
the movie, you can watch the shadow-play ofSicilian families and their cats in the lighted third-floor windows
abutting the cinema. Farther off still, you can hear the wheezy screech of an
old troubadour tenor en­tertaining the cafe crowds in the CorsoUmberto. His
high C's, the most frightening thing since chalk first scraped a blackboard,
pierce even the noisiest of soundtracks.

Life doesn't imitate
art in Taormina – it comes straight in and joins it. In no
other film festival are you so consist­ently invited to compare and entertain
both life and art simultaneously. Which you prefer at any given moment is
wholly up to you. In the words of a friend of mine (a semiologist),
"Suture self."

●

Leaving Taormina's dark blue Med­iterranean sea, our tour next
stops at an Adriatic town made memorable by Ti­tian, Turner, and Katharine Hepburn.

In Venice this year,
the spirit of the festival was even more vexing a ques­tion than in Taormina. Those
puzzled as to why the hell there were so few American films in Venice (only
one U.S. pic in competition, and that
by a Russian director, Andrei Koncha­lovsky'sMaria's Lovers)had to be con­tent with fest chief
Gian Luigi Rondi's explanation that of
the 30 or 40 films he saw, none was in harmony with the spirit of the
festival. Apart from Ma­ria's Lovers,only Streets of Fire and Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom snuck into the main Venice program, both shown
non-competitively.

What is this
"spirit," apparently so vigorously anti-American, that Rondi is talking about? Some thought that séances should
be held to try and find out. Others thought the "spirit" might be,
in some way, related to the famous headless corpse that is supposed to walk
the corridors of the Hotel Hungaria, which stands
on the Lido's main drag and resembles a Castle Dracula that
accepts all major credit cards.

Of course the Venice fest does
have a spirit, just like Taormina. And at its best it's
one of Quatrocento
joy in the new and varied, time-warped forward into the Novecento. It's
certainly nothing to do with the nationalistic putsch Rondi tried to stage this year, cramming the event with
Italian mov­ies (six in the competition and dozens more outside), being
stingy with other countries (except France) and trying to turn the Mostra del Cinema from the international film fair it's been at
its best into a corner shop for home-grown product.

Of the Italian films,
only Paolo and Vittorio
Taviani'sKaos
(Chaos)had the true crystal
ping of a masterpiece. Wherever you tap this five-sided movie, containing
four Pirandello sto­ries and an
epilogue, it rings as beauti­fully as a cut-glass goblet and is as pris­matically colored. Each of the Sicilian-set tales –
a mother who hates her son; a werewolf husband; the breaking of a giant olive
oil jar; a band of peasants defying feudal law to stake out their own burial
ground – show fractured love or compassion under pressure and the way people
set about mending the cracks and stresses. Like Padre Padrone,it
paints primal emo­tions in a furiously beautiful land­scape: the parched
golden fields, the pinnacle-nesting towns. Like The Night of the Shooting
Stars,its camera
eye sweeps across vast groups of hu­mans picking out the special faces,
feelings, and stories.

The rest of Italy's
vast fleet of films variously foundered, struggled, or took on water. Only Pupi Avati'sNoi Tre (We Three)of the non-Tavianipics had
pith and pleasure. Behold the last youthful summer of WA. Mozart (Christopher
Davidson) on the estate of Count Pallavicemi before
he takes the music exam which will propel him out of childhood and into the
grim lap of ge­nius confirmed. Avati deals out
scenes with the enraptured carelessness of a conjuror spraying cards at you.

Which is just about OtarIoseliani's technique in Les Favoris de la Lune
(Moon Madness). This free-floating
Russian-Georgian director, now work­ing in France, clearly subscribes to a
new "Otar Theory": that a director should
not be seen to have any shaping control whatever over the autonomous
fittings and dashings of his characters. Here we
have stolen paintings, crooks, molls, Arab terrorists, priceless Sèvres china,
white horses, good meals, sex, and violence – all the things we get enough of
at home but still want more of. Ioseliani creates a
fast, skewy, frac­tured storyline whose
guessing-game nonsequiturs are just the kind the
filmgoer is happy to take up. How to throw away conventional narrative
without becoming really trying.

This was the common
theme of most of the French films at Venice. Five of them in competition, the
four others coming from the famous French Rs:
Resnais, Rivette,
Rohmer,
and Rouch. Rondi, another R, obviously
thought that France as well as Italy belonged to the "spirit" of
Venice this year – though I would like a complete list, please, of all the
American films that he saw and thought worse than Jean Rouch'sDionysus. This is not only the death of narrative, it's the death of
the audience. As Bacchic eu­phoria erupts across
France, spread by the teachings of American Sorbonne
student
"Hugh Gray" (Jean Monod), parks and
forests and car factories echo to the sound of bands and Bacchanals. It's
like watching Hair reinterpreted by
Marguerite Duras.

Alain Resnais' L'Amour àmort (Love to the Death)is a meditation on love
and death that glooms passionately for 90 minutes across a wide screen. Sab­ine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, Fanny
Ardant, and André
Dussolier play philo­sophic badminton with the Great
Shuttlecock Question, "Can love sur­vive the grave – and should
it?" It's Azéma's lover, M. Arditi, who
cops it; but only after an earlier "death" from which he has,
Lazarus-like, returned. Ardant and Dussolier rally round as two Protestant ministers,
married to each other, who are big on questions about the next life.

Jean Gruault penned the script (he wrote Resnais'
last two films and Truf­faut's own love-after-death
pic, The Green Room,and Resnais keeps punc­tuating
the elliptic tale with shots of a blue screen flurried across by snowflake-like
spermatozoa under a microscope. The film, Lazarus-like it­self, keeps being
reborn from these little deaths. And Resnais,
time-ob­sessed as ever, somehow makes all this outré eschatology fire cannon-like straight from the heart.

●

Candidacy for this
year's Mangy Lion prize was alarmingly oversub­scribed in Venice. The
festival scratched itself silly as it was attacked by such unpleasant
livestock as Carlos Saura'sLos Zancos (The
Stilt Players), inwhich old widower Fernando Fernan
Gomes
falls turgidly in love with young stilt-troupe actress Laura Del Sol; Erden
Kiral'sDer
Spiegel (The Mirror),a Turkish-set tale of
love, murder and remorse which moves at the pace of a wounded turtle; and
Marco Ferreri'soverearnestly
kinky Il Futuro E Donna (The Future Is Woman),in which a pregnant
(actually big-with-child during filming) Ornella
Muti spikes
herself on an eternal triangle with suicidal NielsArestrup and Hanna Schygulla,
who
wears slit vamp dresses and hair swept up à la
Bride of Frankenstein. What a setup! A girl
might as well spend her tender, prena­tal months with the Addams family.

The other major
madness of this year's Venice fest was its baptism of a
new series of "Notes by the Direc­tors": Xeroxed one-page
manifestoes in which the filmmaker is obliged to lay his soul on the line in
not more than 200-odd words. Best screed was Gavino
Ledda's for Ybris,an allegorical Italian
film no one I knew managed to sit through. Ledda
stretches
200 words to about 1,000 and sprinkles such pearls as, "Ybrisis more
than a tetra­gon, is more than polyhedric in its
polyphonic conception and in its telluric structure.... Leonardo sings
the song of the wolf: HOhha­HHHaaaahhh!!! HohhhaAAh­Hahhaaa!!!!!"

Another gripe. The
nightly public showings in the open air arena are now banned to journalists.
Thus there is none of the former joyous interbreed­ing of the
"professional" response with the untrammeled cheering and yahoo­ing
of the public. Some of my happiest evenings in past years have been spent in
the Venice Arena, seeing good films loudly lionized and bad films loudly put
to the sword. Trust the people, Mr. Festival Director; then you'll be able to
trust the journalists.

The following things,
however, were good about Venice in 1984: the video section, raising pop
videos and their ilk to proper importance in the scheme of things
audiovisual; the lav­ish Luis Buñuel retrospective;
and, from what I hear, the screening of Ed­gar Reitz's 15 hour 40 minute folk
his­tory of Germany from 1919 to 1982, Heimat
(Homeland). Alas, I was kept away,
until too late in the proceedings to pick up the threads, by accreditation
problems. (Final gripe.) Heimat has been bought by the
BBC and is in the process of being subtitled in English. The London Film
Festival hopes to screen it, and Ken Wlaschin has
se­cured it for FILMEX 85. I'm looking forward to seeing it. And so, Venezia 1984 e morto. Evviva Venezia 1985. I have reserved my hotel
room, and Don Luigi has promised my gondola will be waiting.